Michael Moore on “Hearts and Minds”

NPR asked Michael Moore to discuss a list of his favorite DVDS. He said he’s only rented half a dozen of them, ever. He’d rather drive four hours to see a film on a big screen with other people. That said, he acknowledged that one of his most favorite movies of all time was the 1974 Vietnam documentary, Hearts and Minds.

It should come as no surprise that one of Moore’s favorite films is a documentary that reveals the, er, truthiness that long plagued the U.S. government’s official pronouncements about the Vietnam War. The film won an Oscar — along with a fair amount of criticism — when it came out in 1974, the year before the war officially ended.

“It is the definitive account of the debacle we know as the Vietnam war,” Moore says. “This film is so well constructed, so emotional, so brilliantly put together — so many great moments.”

Moore says that to this day he still remembers the filmmaker’s interview with Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971. Moore remembers Ellsberg telling the camera, “The question used to be, might it be possible that we were on the wrong side in the Vietnamese war? But we weren’t on the wrong side. We are the wrong side.”

“When he says that — we were the enemy — it really hits you,” Moore says. “To really know that that’s the truth when it comes to a place like Vietnam and now with Iraq — it hurts.”

Letting Go of Sight

I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.

Not This Pig

If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).

Media in Transition @ MiT

Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]

Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]

The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]